Being retired (from the military as of 1997) and from much of anything else involving putting on a skirt suit, pantyhose, low heels and modest makeup in the last three or four years, the Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown really has not impacted my own life much. My daughter’s work and what there is of mine has been home office based for the last four or five years, so sheltering in place has not been much impact on our day to day life. We count this as our good fortune, while realizing to our sorrow that many others in our community are not so fortunately situated.
Up at half-past six, earlier if Larry Bird is creating outside the back yard windows, a leisurely mug of strong tea, while scrolling through various favored websites for a view of what fresh hells await, then a walk with the dogs – our own terrier-mix Nemo, and Penny, the labradoodle who belongs to an elderly neighbor. (One of those upon whom we are keeping a careful eye, as a fragile cancer-survivor.) A very brisk walk through the tangled streets of our subdivision – alas, we were once given to go to the nearest Planet Fitness three times weekly for an hour mostly spent on the elliptical, but they closed at mid-month, so the strenuous walk must substitute. The dogs are getting rather resentful at this program: “Oh, hell, aren’t we done yet?!!” practically appears in thought-bubbles over their heads during the last half-mile or so.
Back to the
house: usually a bit of house-cleaning or gardening – the spring has been quite
splendid, almost unnoticed. The trees are lavishly green, the bulbs planted in
the fall and winter are now producing flowers, the tomato starts that I bought
on sale in the fall and sheltered through the couple of chill spells have
already produced tomatoes, the pole beans planted a week or so ago are
beginning to leap up the frames positioned for their benefit. We were planning
on replacing the chicken house this spring, and refreshing the small flock of
laying hens, which has been reduced to a single semi-productive hen, but it
looks like the current pandemic emergency has caused a run on supplies of
chicks and hens. So – next year, I think. In the meantime, an egg every other
day or so.
An hour or two (or more) at the sewing machine in the den – I’m doing fabric masks, from a pattern on the Joanne’s Fabrics website. It seems that local clinics, hospitals and medical practices are in crying need of them, so I am going through my cotton muslin fabric scrap stash. It’s not as easy going as I would like – the cranky Brother machine that my daughter bought on the installment plan is a temperamental beast, and after re-threading a couple of times and breaking at least one needle, my patience is at an end. My rule – after doing a fair amount of stitching for Matilda’s Portmanteau – is that after I break two needles, I’m done for the day. I have a pattern scanned from a neighbor’s pattern stash for doing surgical caps, which I am given to understand are also needed badly by a local clinic. The Daughter Unit also posted eight of them to my sister in California: she supervises the care of Mom, and needs three masks for her husband and son, and five for the home-care nurses to regularly visit to help with Mom, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down, but otherwise in good shape.
We went out to Walmart Thursday morning for fabric for this new project and another packet of needles. They are apparently going big on social distancing; in the foyer, I was upbraided by a manger for not remaining six feet or more from my daughter as she procured and sanitized a cart. “It’s the city rule!” she protested, when I pointed out that we are related, live together, and arrived in the same car, seated considerably less than six feet apart. Sigh. There are rules; sensible ones, and then the other kind – the variety that authority freaks seem to get off on enforcing. I hold the city authority freaks responsible for this one, not the manager, who in the matter of providing essential products to the public, likely has challenges that I can only imagine in my worst nightmare. (My regular nightmares are epic… last night I had two of the them in a row: “The Radio Station Which Doesn’t Work” in which I try to do live radio from a studio in which nothing works or is in the right place, followed by “I Can’t Find My Car” – in which I wander about endless parking lots around a campus of some kind, trying to find my car, or even remember where exactly I left it. Yeah, I must be stressed or something. The Daughter Unit blames the Walmart manager for this…)
Break for lunch – usually something left over from supper the night before, or a toasted sandwich. Then on to writing, for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I am staggering along on Luna City #9, at a pause on That Fateful Lightening, not that this should worry my half-a dozen fans. Both Quivera Trail and The Golden Road stood half-completed for months, or even years Break for supper around 5 PM. An hour or so of watching something on streaming video – this week our choice has alighted on episodes of “The Good Karma Hospital” – which is agreeable, has scenic backgrounds (filmed on location in Sri Lanka, which used to be known as Ceylon) and deals with mostly solvable medical dilemmas and soap operas teases of an emotional sort. Read in bed for an hour or so after that, attended on one side by Nemo the Terrier (who appears in The Golden Road as Nipper) and on the other by Mom’s former cat, Isabelle the Not-Tightly-Wrapped-Siamese, who has Issues. Don’t we all, these days?
Well, I have to say that social distancing – or even more pronounced
social distancing than is normal for me – is letting me get stuff done around
the house. The Daughter Unit has work obligations, and a social life of sorts, which
the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Panic of 2020 has not yet impacted to any degree.
We stocked up at the beginning of the month, topped up over the weekend, so
there is nothing I particularly need for projects at the moment. The gym has
closed for two weeks – and here was a place which routinely sanitized for your
protection anyway. We walked the dogs energetically this morning, in place of
an hour on the elliptical, and then the Daughter Unit went off to her place of
work, assisting her employer with sorting out their personal and professional
expenses for the year. It turns out today that the IRS will generously grant us
another ninety days to file, due to the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Panic. Well, it’s
a very ill wind indeed that blows no one any good.
I may eventually have to go to Lowe’s for wallpaper paste, and some more paint rollers. The new back door awaits installation now, being painted on all sides, so I moved on to the trim around the hallway doors, and the underside of the attic space access ladder. When the new and toweringly efficient HVAC system was installed some years ago, replacing the decrepit and leaking original contractor-grade system, they put in a brand new ladder and a heavy wooden panel covering it into the hallway ceiling – and I never got around to painting it. So that is done, and tomorrow I will haul in the tall ladder and do the trim around it. I watered the garden, and planted some lettuce, and an assortment of basil seeds. We already have garden tomatoes, by the way – from some starts in 2-inch pots that I bought last fall and protected through the winter, and a wayward plant left over from last year – and the first couple of cuttings of spring salad greens, from seeds I planted early last month. It’s been that warm, you see.
Laundry – done sheets, and blankets. What an onerous chore was
lifted off the shoulders of women, with the invention of electric washing
machines and dryers? What might have been the weekly-occurring project taking
up several days of brutal labor over a boiler, wringer, and clothesline now
takes a turn in the washing machine and two hours in the dryer. Listen, you
could never sucker me into going into one of those ‘history-house’ projects. I
know very well what doing household laundry in the 19th century involved
– at the very best, sending it all out to an industrial laundry in the big city
and hoping that you got all your stuff back again in one piece, or at least,
the pieces you sent it out in. Plus having to sew on all the buttons again,
unless you had a maid to do all that needlework. The late 20th
century to start of the 21st is the best century ever, thanks to
household electricity and plumbing (not to mention air conditioning!) and don’t
ever you let some freak afflicted with nostalgie de la boue a la The Life Primitive
tell you any different. (An all-over bath once a week. Indeed – spare me.
The ancient Romans had the right idea, as far as frequent bathing went.)
And – I processed the bag of small sweet apples through one of those patent apple-peeling/slicing gadgets, dropping them into a bath of water acidulated with a little lemon juice, and put them into the patent dehydrator that I am supposed to do a review of, when all those little apple slices are dried. And only then, did I turn to writing…
I had a client make the final payment on a finished project late this week, and the two potential clients whom we met with earlier in the week are deferring a decision or a start on their projects until later (if ever) so I could take a break from their stuff and do a little bit more on the ongoing house project; a replacement door for the back door into the garage, and one for the second bedroom, which the Daughter Unit currently occupies. We found a quite acceptable metal-reinforced panel door at Home Depot for a reasonable price, but the door for the bedroom is another matter. We were looking for a door with a glass panel in it, for the bedroom is at the end of a hallway with only a single ceiling light, and no natural light from the outside whatever. So – the Daughter Unit has been pushing for the door with a translucent glass panel in it, so as to allow natural light from the bedroom window to seep into the hallway. Only problem was … expense and availability. Such a door is a special order; not in stock at either of the big-box home improvement outlets. Although Wayfair had very nice ones available – the very cheapest of them was $300, which is … a little out of budget. I had to go and order from Home Depot, and the door will be delivered early in May. Until it arrives, my attention will be focused laser-like on the rest of work in the hallway; specifically, covering the ghastly popcorn texture with beadboard panels and cornice molding, and the peel’n-stick lino with cork flooring and new baseboards. (This will be a test run for the look of the rest of the house …) Until I can begin on that, though – I need to replace the narrow set of shelves along the hallway which houses a simply huuuge collection of paperback books. This will involve boxing up all the books, and taking down the metal brackets and MDF planks in order to complete painting that wall, and seeing to a complete-floor-to-ceiling shelf unit just wide enough to accommodate paperback books… no, really, I would rather work on my income taxes …
All the bits and bobs and lists of expenses and
profits from sales in various venues, are all tallied up and ready to be
delivered to the nice gentleman CPA who has done my income taxes since 1995.
What I will do when he retires for real, I have no idea. I can just hope that he
is one of those who will carry on out of habit, looking after a diminishing
pool of clients, rather like my late business partner did with her clients –
and she handed them all onto me, those who survived. I can only hope that my
CPA has a younger apprentice handy.
In other news, it seems that springtime has arrived – alas, not in the trees to the back of the property, which is mystifying. The plum and peach are still bare sticks; no blossoms or budding leaves at all. Neither is there any fresh spring growth on the thrice-cursed hackberry weed tree, just the other side of the fence line – a tree which I hate with the passion of a thousand burning suns for the manner in which it scatters nasty, weedy sprouts all across my yard. I hate the hackberry, so I do. If the wretched seedlings aren’t pulled up entire by the time they are about three or four inches tall, they send a tap-root halfway to the center of the earth and defy extermination … only cutting damned thing off at ground level and painting the bleeding stump with a chemical concoction available from the local nursery keeps it from propagating… This weekend, plant out the various seeds and seedlings, as mid-March marks the last possible frost in South Texas. I did get a jump on this, in sheltering some tomato starts through the winter; they are just now bearing a handful of tomatoes ripe enough to eat, and a tub full of spring greens is nicely ready for salads … and that was my week.
Well, you can, sort of – but in the larger sense Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t physically go home again, not after a good few years have passed. I’ve amused myself, since discovering google earth and street view by looking for and locating the houses that I have lived in, and seeing how they appear now. That is if I have a clear memory of the address, and if the house itself still exists. Which is not always the case: the GI student housing in Santa Barbara was gone shortly after Dad finished the graduate level program at UC-Santa Barbara in the mid-1950ies. I have no notion of where to even begin looking for the house in the backwoods of Beverly Hills (yes, Beverly Hills does, or did have a backwoods, per se.) With unpaved roads, even, although it probably isn’t the case now. The White Cottage at the corner of La Tuna Canyon and Wheatland in the Sun Valley end of the San Fernando Valley is still there, although it looks as if the massive sycamore tree that shaded half of the back yard is gone, and La Tuna Canyon road has been widened and had sidewalks installed, so the fence line has been moved back. I can “walk” up the half-mile of La Tuna Canyon to Vinedale Elementary. The shapes of the hills looming over the canyon, as it funnels back into the Verdugo Hills are still familiar. Many of the roads which ran back from La Tuna Canyon were unpaved then – they’re paved now, it seems.
Mom and I, on the front porch of the GI Bill Student Housing
The next house, which I always thought of as Redwood
house, was at the corner of Hillrose and Rosetta, at that corner of Shadow
Hills which touched the edge of Sunland. Again, a dirt road, and lines of olive
trees which had once been part of an olive orchard. That house is long gone –
it was where the 210 Freeway drops down into Big Tujunga Wash, halfway between
the Ralphs’ on Foothill Boulevard, and the fire station on Wentworth. I can
“walk” from Sunland Elementary to Olive Grove and up a block to Hillrose … and
that’s where the road ends, at a chain-link fence overlooking the highway.
Redwood House, from the hillside below
The house after that, the second house on the left up Cedarvale from Estepa, was curiously only a stone’s throw from the White Cottage, geographically. Not by road, though – it was a drive of at least half an hour between the two, going around through two different canyons. It’s been remodeled, extensively from when we lived there, and the new owners cut down most of the trees around the house. We liked the trees for the shade, but now the view is spectacular, or so I can judge from street view. The pool is still there, but I can’t see if the well still exists. There was a small spring/seep in the hillside, and a small well which never dried out entirely. I lived there from the age of sixteen, until I enlisted in the Air Force. My parents sold that house when my youngest brother finished high school and decamped to Northern San Diego County.
In the driveway of Hilltop House: Little Brother, Dad, the family station wagon and Mom.
I think the barracks where I lived at Misawa AB is
gone; that whole base was revamped when the F-16 wing moved in. I can’t even begin
to find building in the R housing area, out the POL gate where I rented the
little sliver of apartment. That whole area has been revamped. The Wherry
duplex in the enlisted housing area at Mather AFB where we lived for a year –
that’s all gone. It looks like all very upscale condos, now. That was a very
bare-bones kind of place; conblock walls, industrial linoleum on the floor, and
metal cabinets in the kitchen. I had no furniture other than a rattan rocking
chair, a couple of book cases, and my daughter’s crib when we moved in, but by
the time we moved on, I had managed to purchase a single arm chair, an
upholstered small sofa, a round wooden table and two chairs. There was a
trailing rose bush by the front door. The housing office inspector gave me
grief for trying to train it up the porch supports. This experience and the chore
of cleaning that place before checking out of that base cured me of any desire
to live in base housing. Uncle Sam is a sucky landlord.
The barracks at Sondrestrom AB in Greenland is still there; they’ve jazzed up the grey concrete slabs with red and white stripes, and green paint, and put a modernistic entryway to what was the dining facility; not much has changed with all that, at least on the surface. Looks like there are some restaurants, and a B&B, but the general aspect is still gritty grey dust, and bare rock mountains looming above. As we used to say grimly to each other: it’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. In the winter – when it was midnight-dark for most of the day with perhaps a pale twilight at mid-day, it was an amazing and unearthly sight; to come down the hill from the AFRTS station, and see the whole base lit by glowing yellow lights. In the dry arctic air, the vents from the buildings filled the head of the fjord with billowing golden clouds of water vapor.
For three years after that, we lived in a second-floor
apartment on a corner in suburban Athens; a narrow balcony ran around two sides
of the apartment, which took up the whole of a single floor, at the
intersection of Knossou and Delphon.
From the windows on the street side, we could look out at the Saronic
Gulf and the perfect triangular island of Aegina; it looks like they have built
another three or four story apartment block across the street, so likely there
is no chance of that same view from the apartment today. The little tile-roofed
villa across the road in the other direction is still there, but the empty lot
which was next door, in which an elderly man kept chickens and rabbits and a
bit of a garden with lemon trees, has been replaced by another three or four
story apartment block. But the building itself looks well-kept; whoever is
living in the second-floor apartment has a series of nice plants in pots along
the balcony.
Spain: the place where we lived the longest until we
settled in Texas. I had no taste for a high-rise city apartment, which was all
that was on offer, until the friend who was helping me house hunt said, “Let’s
go see if there’s anything in San Lamberto…” This was a complex of duplexes and
low-rise apartment buildings outside the city, which once had been American
base housing, but now was in private ownership. There was an empty unit
available for a reasonable rent, at the corner of what is now Calle Placido
Domingo and Calle C. A ground-floor unit with a garden, and a shaded terrace.
It is barely recognizable, now, although the two palm trees are still there and
thriving. The new owners added a swimming pool, a small addition where I used
to stack wood for the fireplace outside the dining area window, and a covered
shelter for a car. The low wall and pillars are still there, but they have put
in dark green fencing panels above, and the lawn looks a little better than
when I lived there. My daughter went from kindergarten to the sixth grade in
the time we lived there. I tried tracing the route that I usually drove from
San Lam, past the Spanish regional airport to the Garripinellos gate, but again
– too much has been changed. It used to be a narrow wandering country road; now
there’s some fairly substantial interchanges.
The little white and grey house in the middle of the
block of Jefferson between 36th and 37th was the perfect
small house. I wish I could have owned it, so that I could have fixed it up properly.
A perfect dolls’ house, with a big window on either side of the front door, and
a long garden in back, with hedges so thick on either side that the lights of
other houses could barely be seen in summer. Lilacs along one side, a row of
apricot trees on the other, a bearing cherry tree, a shed where we might have kept
chickens, a green lawn and a garden plot which I managed to rototill for two
summers. In the spring, lilies of the valley came up at the edge of the front
walk … we were there for two and a half years. The sun came up in the morning
over the iron-grey wall of the Wasatch front, and in the afternoon, light poured
in through the back of the house through an enormous picture window which gave
on the yard. Paradise. I am still angry at the assignment detailer for my
career field, who did not send me back there; this after hearing for years how
they would reward you for years overseas by making certain that your last
assignment before retiring was to the base where you most wanted to be. The
house looks good, though: the present owner has taken down that cheap metal
awning over the porch, and put in a planter and a new set of steps where the
front porch used to be, and taken out the ragged hedge which formerly bisected
the lawn.
The Jefferson St. House when I lived in it – in winter
Korea: a year in a barracks building, across the road
from the Navy Club at Yongsan Army Infantry Garrison. It looks as if that
building isn’t there, as far as I can see. The whole garrison has relocated to
Camp Humpreys, but the Dragon Hill Lodge still exists, as a recreation center
and hotel run by MWR. No luck in tracing anything of my route to work at AFKN,
on the hill above the main PX.
The one home that I most deeply regret loosing was not
a home which I lived, although my daughter did, during the year that I spent in
Korea; that was Mom and Dad’s retirement place, the house that Dad first
designed and oversaw building on a rocky knoll with a view down into the Guajito,
in the hills above Valley Center, Northern San Diego County. They spent five
years doing this, having initially expected to get it done in three, but had a
marvelous time anyway. When we came home between tours in Spain (having saved
the government a bomb of money through signing on to a second tour in place, so
we had a free round-trip home as a reward) the house was coming down the home
stretch, and we shared the RV with Mom, Dad, and their dogs. It was far enough
along that we celebrated Christmas in the house, among the sheets of drywall
stacked up in the dining are – drywall which Dad would teach me to hang and mud.
Mom designed and laid out the garden – and when the house burned in the Paradise
Mountain Fire in 2003, Mom and Dad moved into another RV on the site and built
it all again, with improvements. (They hired out all the tough jobs that Dad
had done, first time around.) We made a road trip from Texas to California most
years. And then Dad died, suddenly in 2010. Mom didn’t want to leave the place
they had shared, although … we all worried about her being there alone with the
dogs. My youngest brother even brought up how risky it was, only to be slapped
down. A few years later, his fears were realized when Mom fell and injured her
back so severely that she was paralyzed from the shoulders down. Their house
had to be sold, of course. My sister, who took over care of Mom, needed to have
her own house renovated to accommodate a semi-paralyzed invalid. Originally, we
were all four supposed to inherit a quarter share of it, and I entertained thoughts
of buying out my brothers’ and keeping the property as a kind of family compound.
Not to happen. I used the proceeds from the sale of my own California real
estate to fix up the current Chez Hayes. Likely, I will never return to California.
But I look at the view from the dead-end road past Mom and Dad’s house, and
follow the dirt road back, looking at all the places that we went past, and
think of the view over the Guajito, of how I would run on the dirt roads in the
early morning, and the quail pattering through the thicket by the gate because
Dad was in the habit of throwing out seed for them, the bends in the Woods
Valley Road, the stench from the chicken farm at the foot of the last leg of
road up to Mom and Dad’s…
It doesn’t look like the new owners have done very
much, at least, not that we can see from the road view. But the owners of the
next property over seemed to have established a nursery; greenhouses, and sheds
and all. The previous owner of that place had let it go to wrack and ruin;
basically returning to nature after the fire, save for messing around incompetently
with an earth-mover on weekends – to the detriment of the watershed down into
Mom and Dad’s driveway.
My daughter looked at the satellite view, and said, “Don’t
say anything of this to Mom.”
Slowly but surely, stuff is getting done; the Daughter
Unit and I forswore the gym this morning in favor of a very brisk two-mile walk
through the neighborhood with the dogs. I finally finished a post on a WWII
novel which had been lingering in the ‘half-finished’ queue for weeks. Made the
call to activate the new ATM card, and – this was the biggie – filed the state sales
tax form and sent in payment. This was made a bit easier for me for having
worked out a long spread sheet with the formulas for calculating what was due
in each category – which as my sales were pretty minimal last year resulted in
some amounts due to various small entities which were in pennies. So, had to
round up to a dollar on the state web-pay page, in most cases – but the grand
total owed still came out to about what it should have been according to my own
calculations, so that’s all square and taken care of. As far as other tax
materiel – have to wait for the various W-2s to come floating in to put the
tidy package all together for the nice CPA who has looked after my tax stuff
since we settled in San Antonio.
Read a couple of chapters of William Howard Russell’s My Diary North and South – he was the big international correspondent for the Times of London newspaper; a convivial and unrepentant Irishman, often considered the first war correspondent, having made his fame for reporting on interesting developments in the Crimean War. He was sufficiently famous after that to have had many doors open to him and spent the opening months of the American Civil War on a prolonged jaunt through the border states and the south. During a short visit to Washington DC he hobnobbed with many important personalities in the new Republican administration – including a visit to the White House and a meeting with Abraham Lincoln, who was derisively called “the Railsplitter” by many snobbish Northerners which Russell encountered early on. Russell also noted that Lincoln deployed humorous anecdotes as a way of lubricating potentially awkward social encounters … well, I am looking for the low-down on public mood, going into the early months of that war, and Russell looks like a wonderful source for channeling contemporary feelings and observations.
Fiddled around with the Luna City website, added a page for the two compendium volumes, and a PayPal order button after generating the ‘button’ for it, something which I ought to have done weeks and weeks ago. Honestly, I tend to forget about the Luna City website; it’s kind of a static website, not an active blog so much as my book blog/website is.
I fiddled with installing a new doorknob to one of the bedrooms – hoping that this would fix an ongoing problem with the latch not settling properly. Nope; I think this problem won’t be solved until I get around to replacing all the original interior doors in the house. The existing doors are all that cheap contractor-grade hollow core doors … (pauses for a moment to look up the solid wood slab doors at the local Big Box … oh, nice – $125 or so.) replacing the doors will come, possibly later this year. The big project will be replacing the exterior garage door – and maybe we can get a start on that this week, when I can make a down payment on it to the contractor.
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